captioning sponsored by macneil/lehrer productions >> ifill: the northeast struggled to get back on its feet today, even as millions remained without power and bright sunshine revealed the staggering damage. good evening, i'm gwen ifill. >> woodruff: and i'm judy woodruff. on the "newshour" tonight, we update the aftermath of sandy as president obama gets a first hand look at the devastation along new jersey's shoreline. >> ifill: then, how do you plan for increasingly common super storms? ray suarez examines that as part of our series: coping with climate change. >> woodruff: jeffrey brown

repos onhe btle of the grod ga, ha fought on wisconsin's turf. >> who knew? it turns out that green bay is one of the most swinging cities in the whole country, politically speaking, that is. we'll explain. >> ifill: the supreme court devoted its day to drug-sniffing dogs and privacy rights. we talk with marcia coyle of the national law journal. >> woodruff: and spencer michels looks at the complaints about apple's maps and the high stakes for those trying to come up with something better. >> the battle over digital map making indicates how crucial this field has become and it could bode well for consumers as the maps get better. >> ifill: that's all ahead on tonight's "newshour." major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: ♪ ♪

moving our economy for 0 years. bnf, t engine that connects us. and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. and... this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> woodruff: the u.s. death toll

from the giant storm named sandy has risen to at least 63 today. about 6.5 million homes and businesses are still without electricity though there were signs of daily life returning to its usual rhythm in some places. a familiar sound returned to lower manhattan streets last night. ( horns honking ) the power did not. police helped direct traffic with signals still dark, but one taxi driver said it wasn't worth the risk. >> it's been dangerous. i've got to go home, i'll walk. there's no traffic signal light, no nothing there. >> woodruff: you're going home? you're done? >> i'm done already. >> woodruff: it wasn't much easier for pedestrians who made their way on foot, some with only flashlights leading the way. >> it's really unsettling becauswe d't he por. we don't know what's going on. we don't have anywhere to get to televisions. >> woodruff: many people flocked to mobile charging stations across the city.

plugging in cell phones and other devices. but today brought some sign of things slowly returning to normal in the big apple. this morning, mayor michael bloomberg rang the opening bell on wall street where activity returned to the trading floor. commuters crowded near bus stops with routes now up and running. others walked across city bridges alongside cars snarled in traic jams. some broadway shows returned to the stage as well. the subway system remains closed, as crews work to clear stations that remain flooded. a task new york governor andrew cuomo said is being prioritized. >> getting the water out of the tunnels is probably the main, one of the main orders of business right now. these are significant challenges that we're facing and problems, in many cases, that we've never experienced before or n in a generation. >> woodruff: cuomo announced limited subway service will

start thursday morning. flooding kept laguardia airport closed. j.f.k. and newark airports have resumed some travel. and high waters led to a number of rooftop rescues of trapped residents yesterday in staten island. late today, new york city mayor michael bloomberg said most bridges and tunnels will be restricted to high-occupancy vehicles for next several days. but he said his city is on the road to recovery. >> bottom line is we've lost some people and pray for families. go forward here and keep this city going and make sure we have visitors and jobs for people. do that in the names we lost. thank you very much. >> reporter: in new jersey, aerial views from helicopters revealed scenes of total devastation.

eire neighborhoods underwater in ocean county, an amusement park along the jersey shore in seaside heights in disarray, with some rides washed away by the waves. those displaced by the storm have been taking shelter in gymnasiums and other facilities. >> we never went trough anything like this. we may have had a storm where it blew a couple of things back and forth, but for it to be flooded out, all over the place, disheveled. >> i'm 69 years old and it's worse i've ever seen in my life. >> halloween will be on monday in new jersey, all right. >> reporter: today, new jersey governor chris christie met with residents in sayreville. many he spoke to were in tears. >> i've got nothing left, our memories and everything else, everything's ruined, ruined. >> i know that. it's going to be okay. >> i'm devastated over this, i'm devastated. >> i wanted to come see sayreville today before i see the president this afternoon. i want him to understand that it's not just the jersey shore

that's been devastated, but other parts of our state as well that were damaged by the storm surge. he can't be everywhere obviously across the state today. >> woodruff: a short time later, governor chrise greeted president obama and federal emergency management agency head craig fugate in atlantic city. the trio toured the storm damage along the coast. >> we're going to have a lot of work to do. i don't want anybody to feel that somehow this is all going to get cleaned up overnight. we want to make sure that people have realistic expectations. but what i can promise you is that the federal government will be working as closely as possible with the state and local officials and we will not quit until thiis don and the directive i have given-- and i said this yesterday but i will repeat and i think craig and others who are working with me right now know i mean it-- we are not going to tolerate red tape, we're not going to tolerate bureaucracy. >> woodruff: meanwhile, republican mitt romney returned to the campaign trail today with three events in florida.

the g.o.p. presidential nominee also mentioned the ongoing recovery in the northeast. >> this is... this is quite a time for the country, as you know. we're... we're going through trauma in a major part of the country, a kind of trauma you've experienced here in florida more than once. and... a it's interesting to see how people come together in a circumstance like this. we've seen folks from all over the country step forward and... and offer contributions. >> woodruff: bumps in the recovery were evident in new york city late today, where the public, bellevue hospital , started evacuating about 500 patients because of deteriorating conditions. >> ifill: and for more on fill a short time ago vernor cmo said laguaia area will open for flights tomorrow morning. today's developments, we're joined again tonight by warren levinson of the associated press.

he's been making his way around new york city today, and is just back from a trip to the evacuated bellevue hospital. warren, what do we know about why they decided to send patients away? >> well, we're not getting a lot of information from the hospital, gwen, but essentially what happened is just like new york university hospital up the road from them, they lost power when the storm hit, they had emergency generators, more of their emergency generators than n.y. hospital were workg s th werableoaintain power. but when they took a really hard look what's doing in the basement they realizedded we've got 17 million gallons of sea water in here and these generators are not going to hold up. so discretion being the better part of valor, they're moving patients. it's a massive undertaking and probably won't be done for a day or so, nearly 500 patients who have to go. they were, as the storm was approaching, diverting patients to other hospitals but it's a laborious process to find a bed for somebody and then get that person into an ambulance and move them out starting with the ckes >> ifi: million galns of sea water sounds amazing,

actually. i want to ask you about two other things that mayor bloomberg talked about today in his briefings. one is that if you want to get in a car and drive into manhattan tomorrow there are now limitations. what are those limitations? >> the limitations are that starting at 6:00 in the morning it's three people per vehicle. apparently police will be there keeping you from getting into the city, getting into manhattan. if you try, they'll pull you over, won't letou in and all the other drivers ll wiz by. that's maint. what we saw today was an increase in traffic as people wanting to get back to some sense of normality getting around because we still don't have subways, we do have buses but the buses that i saw today were really, really packed and mainly sitting in traffic. >> ifill: the other thing the mayor talked about is that he is canceling the opening tip for the basketball game in brooklyn thithis weekend but that he's nt canceling the new york marathon which is supposed to take place this weekend. what's t reasong behind

those two? >> wl, t marhonisunda so that you have a little bit more time to get ready for it. the basketball game is tomorrow -- was to be tomorrow night. the key thing with the basketball game is that the great selling point of the new arena in brooklyn is it sits on top of 11 mass transit lines. none of them are running. the hope is, i suppose, that the marathon can somehow get it together, that it mostly goes through major roads and that they will be mostly clear for marathon runners. it will be a big question, a big challenge for them getting here from somewhere else, especial if they'r fing i and, course, people supporting them getting to where they want to see them on the course. it's going to be awfully difficult. >> ifill: warren, it looks like almost a tale of two cities. behind you you can see the skyline of new york but we know there's a huge swath of the city still operating without power, without juice, without anything that approach what is you describe as normalcy. as you were traveling around the city today, how did that manifest itself?

>> the thing that was aazing waseople standinground fire hydrants gtingwat in y container they could manage because they haven't got water in their homes. we even saw kids in halloween costumes with their halloween buckets held up to the fire hydrant to get water because they'd run out of buckets at home. >> ifill: how about gas lines? we've been hearing gasoline is getting harder to come by. >> we hear gasoline is harder to come by. i didn't see any gas lines but i wouldn't be surprised. awfully difficult to deliver gasoline under these circumstances. >> ifill: are any officials at this point other than the reopening we saw late this afternoon of laguardia and the partial opening of the other two irpos, are any official giving timetables of when we'll see full operation of subways, other transit lines, bridges, tunnels? >> anybody who gives an actual specific deadline for when things will actually be fully running is living in a fool's paradise. the problem really is not just

that there's damage, not just that there's water. you can kind of figure out how long it will take water to be pumped out, but you can't know until the water is pumped out and you closely inspect equipment how much damage there is underneath. >> ifill: one final kind of experiential thing are people frustrated orre ey taking this in n stride? what is the mood of the people you've been talking to in the streets today? >> well, gwen, you've seen what happens in disasters. at first it's a break in the routine. it's bad but if everybody is okay it's kind of a party, it's kind of different. but after a while it gets frustrating. you get out of the things that make your life work and makes you unhappy, you saw the frustration in people you talked to where they're struggling to recover from the storm. so the longer it goes on, the mo the frustration level will build up. we haven't seen it break at any point or explode at any point, but it's not all that far away. >> ifill: warren levinson of the associated press, thanks so

much. >> you bet. >> woodruff: still to come on the "newshour": should we plan for more superstorms; playing the ground game in wisconsin, using drug-sniffing dogs for criminal searches and making modern-day maps. but first, the other news of the day. here's kwame holman. >> holman: wall street's return to business after its two-day shutdown from the storm amounted to a nearly flat day of trading. the dow jones dustrial avera lost more than ten points to close at 13,096. the nasdaq fell more than ten points to close at 2,977. unemployment across the eurozone reached a record high of 11.6% in september. that means nearly 18.5 million people are out of work. the official figures were announced today by the e.u.'s statistics office. spain led the list with nearly 26% unemployment. spain is one of five eurozone nations already in recession, along with greece, italy, portugal and cyprus.

on the presidential campaign trail today, vice president biden accused the romney campaign of perpetuating a quote, outrageous lie, in ads on the obama administration's auto industry bailout. the ads assert general motors and chrysler are adding jobs in china at the expense of workers in ohio. both g.m. and chrysler have protested. but the romney campaign insists the facts in the ads are accurate. syrian government forces stepped up widespread air assaults on opposition strongholds today, anti-government activists said, after a holiday ceasefire fell apart. amateur video showed mig fighter jets strike near a mosque on the outskirts of damascus. warplanes also pounded the north, in towns including dair al zour. two days of bombing have left at least 185 people dead. meanwhile, u.s. secretary of state hillary clinton called for a shakeup of the syrian opposition in its bid to oust president assad. she said it should include

people who've been fighting on the front lines, not just activists who've lived outside of syria for decades. in china, a government think tank urged leadership to end the country's one-child policy. it recommends each family be allowed to have two children by 2015, and by 2020 all limits be dropped. the one-child policy was introduced in 1980 to help curb china's population growth. but it's been widely unpopular and led to imbalances, both between boys and girls and the nation's aging population and its labor force. letitia baldrige, the author and etiquette maven, has died at a nursing home outside washington. she had severe osteoarthritis and cardiac complications. baldrige served as first lady jacqueline kennedy's chief of staff, planning state dinners and social gatherings at the white house. later, "time" magazine hailed her the arbiter of "new american manners" for defining etiquette for the workplace. letitia baldrige was 86 years old.

those are some of the day's major stories. now, back to judy. >> woodruff: and we take up a question that is being discussed in the wake of the hurricane. shod cities and stas strt making bigger changes to prepare for the consequences of natural disasters and severe weather? ray suarez has the story as part of our ongoing series on coping with climate change. >> suarez: a hurricane in the final days of october, fed by warm ocean water, slams the eastern seaboard. it's a reminder of how often extreme weather events have been in the news. the debate over climate change-- whether it's real, and who or what is causing it-- rages on without signs of abating. superstorm sandy battered the coastline. and a record 14-foot storm surge brought new york city to a standstill, leaving the city with potentially staggering repair costs. all this came just months after the summer heat wave caused harsh droughts throughout the midwest, and wildfires that

engulfed entire swaths of colorado, according to the national oceanic and atmospheric administration the last year from june of 2011 to july of 2012 was the nation's warmest year since recordkeeping began in 1895. and it's just over a year ago that hurricane irene caused record flooding in the northeast. but with sandy came new records and according to new york governor andrew cuomo, more pressure for governments to act. >> i joke that every two years we have a 100 year flood. the frequency is way up. it is not prudent, to sit here, i believe, at this point and say, well it's not going to happen again. once you have that recognition, then what are you doing about it. and what design changes, what construction changes are you making to deal with it. >> suarez: as new york struggl to recover from sandy, cuomo looked to the long-term, calling for a "fundamental rethinking of our built environment."

one key issue: how to protect the new york subway system which experienced the worst damage in it's 108 year history. many stations remain submerged under several feet of water even as limited operations are expected to resume tomorrow. but infrastructure renovations are not always a clear fix. mayor michael bloomberg, who has taken a number of steps to make new york a greener city, has not yet proposed a major infrastructure change that might deal with rising water levels, for example. but he warned again today that citizens and policymakers need to take climate change predictions seriously. >> it's not the sort of thing that you can ever say for sure but the consequences of making a mistake in either direction are pretty severe and i think what we have to do is learn from this and protect our infrastructure to the extent possible. the bottom line is we've lost some pple, we have to ke suree help the families and

pray for them. we have to at the same time ensure that we go forward here and keep the city going. >> suarez: part of the growing problem: new york's coastal waters are expected to rise as much as two feet by the middle of the century. in 2010 outgoing governor david patterson issued a report on the state's rising sea levels. he recommnded erecting structural barriers and moving population centers away from the coasts. some experts have said the cost ofroteting new yorcity against floods could run as much as $10 billion. >> suarez: for a look at the costs and choices u.s. communities are facing, we turn to joseph romm, editor of the blog, "climate progress" and a senior fellow at the center for american progress, a liberal policy group. he's also the author of "hell and high water." and kenneth green, a resident scholar on energy and the environment at the american enterprise institute, a conservative think tank.

gentlemen, we hea mayor bloomberg, governor cuomo sort of wrestling outloud with making these choices. knowing what we know does philadelphia, does boston, does new york have to use a changed municipal math to run its daily affairs because of threats of these kinds of things? joe romm? >> well, i think as governor cuomo said, it's a new normal but we have old infrastructure. i think if f you listen to client scientists -- if we had listened to climate scientists who worned, no could flood like this, that storm surges were going to increase as the sea levels rose because ofgob waming and because of more intense storms we might have prevented it. now i think we need to listen to climate scientists who are warning that sea levels could rise, two feet-- as you heard-- by the middle of the century but three, four, five and six feet by the end of the century. so our choices are twofold. we should reduce greenhouse gas emissions so we're on the low end of future warming estimates

and secondly we've got to start preparing for the storms that we are stuck with, like hurricane sandy. >> suarez: he used the word "prudence. whats prudent at ts point? >> that's the question. i agree we have a lot of infrastructure problems in the country. many of our infrastructure problems are actually caused by bad policy, building infrastructure in places without signals to say how valuable they are and without insurance regimes in place to make sure they're maintain and built to a proper level of safety. as governor cuomo said, the question is, okay, we agree something needs to be done but what do you do about it? this is where i will differ with joe which is he wants to focus on greenhouse gas emission reductions and spending our money in that reduction. i want to focus on way wes build resiliencin our cities. i want to find ways where we use markets and use market like structures to make sure that people aren't putting themselves in harm's way but a they know they get a free rebuild. that they're not overbuilding infrastructure in dangerous or sensitive areas because it serves a rich community that

actually has connections to city hall. >> suarez: let me stop you there. whenever you say "build more resiliency" obviously there's a laundry list of choices there. you can make it absolutely impermeable and bulletproof or just a little safer than it is today and t cost is going to vary a great deal. >> that's right. we willeverave risk-free world. in fact, you wouldn't want one because with risk comes learning. but you're not going to build, for instance, your waste water treatment plant for a 100 year storm surge. most of the rest of the time it would be operating at horrible levels of inefficiency if you overbuilt something that way. so when i say "resilience" it doesn't mean we avoid all harm. resilience means you bounce back efficiently and effectively. we need to build resilience, not resistance. >> suarez: well, joseph romm you began the conversation by saying had we listened to earlier projections we bead in better shape. if municipal leaders had gone to the people of thategi and said "we've got to get ready, a storm is coming someday, it's going to cost x number of dollars to build in protections

to the new york city subway system" would you have been able to raise that money? are people ready to hear that kind of argument? or is it now going to be crisis financing as you try to clean up a very badly damaged system? >> well, i think you're absolutely right, ray. look, people warned katrina that new orleans needed to be able to withstand a category 5. they didn't design the levees to withstand it and we see what happed. nowe s theame thiith sandy. i think the hope has to be that sandy isn't short for cassandra and that it's another warning that we ignore. absolutely people now have seen that you can in fact have the worst-case scenario, which was a flooding of the lower manhattan and i think any city along the eastern sea board has ask-to-ask themselves what would happen if hurricane sandy hit us? >> suarez: well, how do we price risk, then, into the decisions we make both publicly and privately. should there with b places in new jersey,n new york, where surace companies s "we don't want to pay for you to

rebuild right there"? where the cost of doing so becomes higher and maybe prohibitive for some people? >> there probably should be, yes, because the alternative is we keep enticing people to place more and more of their value, more and more of their wealth in fragile co-systems or fragile areas of the environment if we don't give them the proper price signal on risk. so somehow we have to find a way to get the state out of being the insurer of last resort and get some sort of a more fuctioning or imitation of a fctioningnsurce market th icesisk appropriately. >> suarez: so who has to be the bad guy then? is it private business solely or does government have a hand in saying to people, creating common wisdom on this kind of thing "we just can't live in the way we've always lived because the environment's going to be different"? >> well, i think there's no question it's going to have to be both. it's -- ult mayly the private sector does the private sector and rebuild bug the government has to be able to come in and

tell people, you know, you can't live in a once in a hundred year flood plain becau it'so longer once in a hundred year, now it's once in every ten years. and i think that's a very good argument for why we have to reduce carbon pollution because i can't tell you where the next superstorm will hit. i just know that you're going to get another one-year flood somewhere and the more that we pollute, the more heat trapping gases we put in the atmosphere, the more places are going to experience this disaster and i agrewith ken completely. you can't design every single city and every single system for the once in a thousand year storm. so let'sot wait by doing nothing on greenhouse gas pollution so that every place experiences that thousand-year storm sooner or later. we need to minimize the number of extreme weather events while we're designing resilience into the systems we have today. >> suarez: politicians hate to approach people with a can't-do proposition. is that why we haven't heard that much about climate change

and the consequences and the need for choices in this latest presidential campaign? >> i don't think so. i think you're seeing a poll-driven result. that , y look at the pollof public opion survey where people are asked what is of most concern to them, the environment has never ranked particularly highly compared to the economy and opportunities in education and defense and crime and things like that. but that's been declining over time. in fact, you unpack the environment section of what people care about, climate tends to rank virtually dead last. people are more concerned with their local environment: air pollution, water pollution, things like that. this is why we've seen these new poll-tested terms like "carbon pollution." c.o.-2 is the thing i'm exiling at you right now, we breathe out rbon dioxide. soe're seeing new terms called green energy instead of climate change because polls show people are skeptical and dubious of those motivations. they believe it's been overblown and it turns people off. >> suarez: joseph romm, why haven't we heard more about this

topic during the national campaign? >> well, of course, mitt romney gets money from fossil fuel interests that's one reason he even opposes a clean energy tax credit for wind. obama, i think, is just misreading the polls entirely. the latest polling shows that -- i think ken is right. when global warming becomes local that the public becomes concerned about it. that's why the polls in the last two years have shown the public is increasingly concerned and this is particularly true of independent voters also. they are very concerned about their local pollution but also the extreme weather that they've been seeing. who could miss $14 billion extreme weather disasters in this country last year and over $7 this year. everyone sees the weather is going crazy and it's affecting them. it's not going to be affecting distant people in a distant land a distant time from now. it's happening here and now. >> suarez: joseph romm, kenneth green, gentlemen, thank you both. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> suarez: we've rounded up all of our reporting on these issues on our "coping with climate change" page on our web

site. take a look. >> ifill: and we turn to the final days of the presidential contest. among the key states in both campaigns' sights is wisconsin. polls show the race there so close, that both sides agree the outcome will all come down to who has the better ground game. jeffrey brown reports from the badger state. >> reporter: in green bay, above all else, people love their packers. and this sunday before a home game at legendary lambeau field, the faithful were out in force, tossing footballs, grilling brats and burgers and, this being just before halloween, donning their best zombie brett favre costumes. they also love politics here. more than 70% of wisconsin's eligible voters went to the polls in the last few presidential elections, the second highest tally in the country. so, naturally, politics and packers mix.

democratic congresswoman tammy baldwin, herself in a tight race for an open senate seat, was here to boost her party's chances. >> we're here at lambeau field, where thousands of people are flocking in to enjoy a great football game. but also just reminding people about their solemn duty to vote, as citizens. and we have a big focus in the final days on getting out the vote. >> reporter: on the other side, republican senator ron johnson had joined up with romney-ryan campaign bus. >> this thing is going to go right down to the wire. i'm cautiously optimistic about it. >> reporter: in fact, barack obama won this state handily in 2008 he was well ahead here this year until the first debate, when mitt romney gained ground. >> when mitt romney led bain, hundreds of plants, factories, and stores were shuttered. workers saw their wages slashed, their jobs sent overseas. >> look at the evidence of the last four years. under the president's policies,

middle income americans have been buried. hay ear just being crushe >> reporte for lal cizens that's meant a flood of ads, stuffed mailboxes, thousands of phone calls and knocks on their doors. by one recent count, this area is the most saturated political market in the nation. the national campaign for the presidency has come down to a battle for a relatively small number of swing counties and brown county here is one of them for the competing parties, everything now depends on organization, the so-called ground game. ben sparks is communication director for the romney campaign in wisconsin. >> the key to winning races in wisconsin is enthusiasm and voter intensity. in 2010, when republicans had historic electoral gains through the state, the story of the day was not that the democrats stayed at home. rather, the story was that the republicans turnout. >> reporter: indeed republicans are counting on gains they made two years ago when scott walker became governor and both chambers of the state

legislature flipped from democrat to republican. that was followed by a recall campaign started by public- sector labor unions aided by democratic state legislators and voters. all inll, ited to the chief fact of political life in wisconsin: bitterly divided, almost permanent political warfare for almost three years now. this is state that is both energized and exhausted. >> i can't wait for it to be done. i'm just tired of all the negative things. one person trashes the other one. >> the ads all seem to be negative. you kind of tune them out when it's negative. >> it is annoying with all the calls and the ads and all that kind of stuff. most people know who they're going to vote for anyway. >> reporter: republicans think they can build on the grassroots campaign that succeeded in thwarting the recall effort and on having native son paul ryan on the ticket. yesterday, the campaign brought a surprise star-- ann romney to the green bay field office to greet volunteers. ( applause ) her husband had cancelled a visit to wisconsin in the wake

of sandy, as had president obama, who'd planned to speak at a rally in green bay last night. both turned their efforts to the storm on the east coast. and in green bay, ann romney talked up storm relief. >> this is a time for us to care -- all americans-- to reach out and help others. >> hello, this is marley. i'm calling from organizing for america. >> reporter: of course, democratic volunteers were also working hard at their local office in another part of town. the president, in fact, has more than twice as many field offices in the state as romney more boots on the ground. and the competition for door- knocks and one-on-one contact here is intense. mary ginnebaugh is brown county democratic party chairman. >> we had a huge canvass the last two weekends, knocking on doors, talking with people. we have just been working really hard to identify the people that we know are sort of on that fence, haven't committed, maybe have voted republican in the

past or have voted democratic in one election and republican another time. we see there's this ying yang sort of thing going on and were trying... >> reporter: ying yang? here in green bay? >> yeah, yeah. even here in green bay. right. >> reporter: in fact, this is the main reason for all this attention here: confuscious would say: yin-yang american political strategists see it as bush-obama because wisconsin had the most counties in the nation to vote for george bush in 2004 and then switch to barack obama in 2008. brown county was one of them. but then it swung back to republican scott walker for governor in 2010. the question is what next? st. norbert college political scientist wendy scattergood says that even in a deeply divided electorate, the wisconsin tradition of tough-minded independent voters is alive and well. >> they tend to be moderates. they do want to see bi- partisanship.

they want to see people working together. and so when they get really frustrated or if their perception is that either on the right of the left that they're moving too far to the extreme, they throw them out of office. but having done that only two years ago it wouldn't surprise you that this state could flip again? yeah, absolutely. we have a tradition of being very, very closely matched between democrats and republicans, so those independents n make all the differenc >> you can canvass, phone, input data, whatever you want. >> reporter: how many persuadables are there? that's also being pursued by some major non-party player, who are, by law, required to work independently from the parties. one is we are wisconsin a coalition of labor unions and other partners, including planned parenthood. theses groups helped push and then lost badly in the recall vote against scott walker. kristen crowell is the executive director of we are wisconsin.

she says her people were definitely down, but hardly out. >> i did a tour around the state immediately after the recall election and visited 17 cities. and i can tell you that activists were-- they were not defeated. they said this is one battle in a war that were going to continue to wage for the working class. >> reporter: for her group, too, these last days of the campaign are about one-to-one contacts. crowell wouldn't let our camera shoot her data base, but she showed me how, as she put it, ward by ward, we know who's undecided. >> what's interesting is we're able to aggregate issues that people care about. so when we go talking door to door there's a place, if you can see here to mark what candidates they are supporting. so these are individuals with their address and these are boxes to fill in for how strong or weak they are on particular candidates. >> absolutely. and all of this gets entered every night by our team and to our voter file, so we're working with the most current information constantly. >> reporter: of course, the

other side does exactly the same thing. at the titletown brewery, a smaller group was making their own phone calls. fewer in number, but backed by more money, for this was the americans for prosperity organization founded by the koch brothers to push conservative economic policies. luke hilgemann is the groups wisconsin director. >> we actually have seven full time field staff here in the state of wisconsin who are working with 125,000 volunteer activists all across the state, spreading the message that barack obama's policies have failed to live up to the promises that he made. >> reporter: hilgemann used language very similar to crowell in describing his groups use of technology. he also echoed others about the voters themselves. >> they're very independent minded. they are hard-working, working class citizens that vote for the person. they think the person is the best-- the person that most exemplifies who they are and will do the best job for them. so i think what you see here in green bay is a microcosm of what you see all across this state, the people want a new direction.

>> reporter: given recent shifts here, though, the question in wisconsin remains: which really is the new direction? one prominent local citizen isn't tipping his hand. we met green bay mayor jim schmitt at a.l.s. hamburger shop. i noticed you're not endorsing either candidate. why's th? >> no. you what... what? look, i'm the mayor. i know who i want to be mayor, but when it comes to... >> reporter: you feel good about that one! >> i feel pretty good about that endorsement. >> reporter: mayor schmitt may be the smartest politician around. with a constituency fiercely divided and independent, he directed us to his own house a few blocks away. there we found one sign for a democratic state assembly candidate and another for a republican running for the state senate. >> ifill: president obama and mitt romney rescheduled their wisconsin events for later this week. want to examine the fallout no matter who wins? you can explore every electoral

college scenario in our vote 2012 map center. >> woodruff: is an alert from a drug-sniffing dog enough to justify police searching a home or a car? that's the question the supreme court explored today in two cases. marcia coyle of the "national law journa was in the courtroom thisorni to hear the arguments. and she's here with us tonight. welcome back. >> pelley: thanks, judy. >> woodruff: i imagine it's not alalthat often the courtt hears a case about a dog much less two cases. >> it is a little unusual. in a sense we've gone from high-tech questions under the forth amendment, like the attachment of g.p.s. devices to cars, to low tech questions under the fourth amendment. these two cases come in two very different factual situations. the first case that was argueded this morning, a police officer was acting on an anonymous tip

that marijuana was being grown in a house. he took his narcotics-trained dog up the driveway to the front door of the house. after a time the dog alerted by sitting at the base of the front door. the police officer left the dog with another officer to go get a search warrant. the question for the supreme court is, should he have had a search warrant with him before he allowed the dog to sniff? was the dog's sniff a search under the fourth amendment? the second case doesn't involve ahouse, it involves a pickup uck. a pice ofcer stopped the pickup truck for a traffic violation, noticed that the driver was sweaty and very nervous and when he went to check the driver's license he brought out his dog, aldo, a german shepherd, and had him do a sniff around the truck. the dog alertedded on the handle of the door and the police officer used that to search the truck. the question for the court is whether the dog sniff itself

gave the police probable cause in order to search the truck. the florida court ruled aganst law enforcement in both cases so it was the state of florida that brought the cases to the supreme court today. >> woodruff: so the justices heard these separately. and what kinds of questions were they asking. the first about the case involving the house? >> well, the state of florida was represented by the same lawyer in both cases, former solicitor general gregory gar and he told the justices that in prior cases of the supreme court the court found that drug-sniffing dogs were rathe ique and they cod sarch luggage, open containers because we don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in contraband. and he said this was really no different here but he ran into trouble across the bench from justices. the home, it appears, the difference in the eyes of the

court. justice ginsburg said, for example, "under your theory of the case, couldn't police take drug sniffing dogs into neighborhoods that have drug problems and go door by door having the dog sniff or ont door? intan apartmt building and go door by door?" justice scalia pointed out that there is a rule a police cannot come within the curtilage of a home, that's the area immediately surrounding the home in order to get a better view of what's inside of the house with their binoculars and why, he said, is a dog any different? so there was a lot of skepticism about florida's position? >> reporter: and how did the florida attorney respond? >> mr. gar said, you know, under court precedence under the law poli officers alone canalk up to front door, knock on the door and talk to the resident in order to uncover evidence of a crime. it's no different with a dog. >> woodruff: what about the other case? this was the dog on the handle

of the door of the car the dog smelled something. >> right, and there the question is was that probable cause for the search. and probable cause has to be more than a suspicion and the courts when they try to determine whether there was probable cause because a criminal defendant is challenng the search lks at l the circutance here the florida sueme court looked at the reliability of the dog, aldo, and wanted the government and law enforcement to pro produce evidence that this dog was reliable. how was it traind? was the handler traind? was it certified? and mr. gar for the state of florida said that these were extraordinary requirements and he was supported by the obama administration's lawyer who also said what would happen if the court constitutnalized thse requiments was that you wod start having mini trials with expert witnesses and dogs would be put on trial to determine

their reliability and it just wasn't necessary. the court seemed to have trouble trying to find what kind of requirements would ensuring reliability and therefore probable cause for a search. and justice sotomayor, for example, noted that there have been some recent studies that show these dogs aren't infallible. there's one that she noted that had a 12%ccury tend she said she was a little troubled by that but it wasn't as clear in the house case that the justices were going to have a problem. >> woodruff: we're going to focus on the track record of those dogs. >> right, and it's hard to measure how reliable a trained dog is. >> woodruff: quickly, marcia, so there's a precedent here but the court is taking a whole other look at these two cases? >> yes, it is. it's never confronted head on a dog sniff of the front door of the use belie it or not in

this day and age >> woodruff: all right, an interesting day in the court. marcia coyle of the "national law journal". >> thank you, my pleasure. >> ifill: finally tonight, the big business of digital map making. as soon as apple launched its new maps service, complaints followed, the company apologized and this week, a top executive announced his resignation. that executive, scott forstall had refused to sign the letter of apology, but his team helped build the maps application. the competition betwe app and google tells a new tale of modern map making. "newshour" correspondent spencer michels has our story. >> reporter: getting turn by turn directions from your mobile phone has become a part of life for many people who drive. that's lured more companies into the lucrative business of using digital maps because there's

money to be made. until september almost all those phone maps were supped by google. buwhenpple introduced the new iphone 5, it replaced google maps with its own and learned quickly that map making is fraught with peril. immediately, users complained they got lost: some landmarks were out of place, directions were misleading. apple c.e.o. tim cook apologized, but still satirists had a field day with the misdirections. the stakes in the mapping game are high for apple and others since a lot of advertising revenue depends on knowing the location of the phone and promoting something nearby, a restaurant or a hotel, to the user. carolina milanesi, an analyst for gartner, a technology research firm, says apple wants to capitalize on that. >> apple needs to own maps. they need to own location.

the end game is knowing your location so you can monitize from that knowledge, knowing what the consumers do, where they are and what they do where. >> reporter: google or apple can deliver paid advertising to users, based on their current location or where they intend to go. there's also plenty of one-ups- manship in the map making business, where pizzazz on the screen is attractive and useful to someone like david rumsey, a san francisco map collector with a healthy respect for apples efforts in digital map making. he runs apple maps on one ipad and google maps on his other. >> what's interesting about the apple is we are in 3-d. so as we zoom in we can change and see thehole scene in three dimensions. in google maps we can zoom in or course, the resolution is just as good. but we don't see it in 3-d.

in order to see it in 3-d, we go to google earth. so googles got two applications, apple rolled it all into one. it's amazing they put this together so quickly. in some ways you see as a collector, i'd say i want them both. >> reporter: rumsey acknowledges that making maps always has been difficult, costly and labor- intensive. google is usually regarded as the leader of the digital world in maps, with everything from skyview to street view to google earth contributing to its displays. brian mcclendon is vice president of google maps. >> we worked very hard, we bought data from as many providers who had already been making maps before and tried to bring them together into a unified single interface. the u.s. government's actually a very good source for sort of raw map data, but it doesn't make a good map on its own. you need to do a lot of work to massage it. >> reporter: the company began making its own maps in 2008. it won't say homany people it devotes to map making, but indications are its in the thousands, including the drivers

of the street view cars that roam the streets in 43 countries, continuously taking photos with nine on board cameras. >> we also have g.p.s. on board, and were able to combine the imagery plus the g.p.s. to provide precise location information about where the picture was taken, and this helps us locate businesses, street addresses that are far higher precision than any map makers had before. >> reporter: as the field progresses, the company is gathering more and more data, including pictures from camera- equipped trikes, which roam business sites, university campuses and parks, to map trails, pathways and buildings. the pictures not only contribute to digital maps, but also provide a detailed image of each street: its businesses, its neighborhood. engineering supervisor michael weiss-maliks job is to integrate it all, using a tool called atlas.

we can turn on, say, data from the u.s. geological survey, which are very old paper maps actually that have been scanned in. the photo comes from satellite imagery, and from airline imagery that people collect, so we fly planes to collect aerial imagery. the blue lines are the data that comes from the census. >> reporter: the challenge is keep the maps constantly updated, as roads and buildings change. >> the problem with making a map is that its never done. the world keeps changing, the great thing that we have is that were able to fix it really quickly. we go through and align these by dragging them around on the satellite imagery to make sure everything looks just right. >> reporter: for mapmakers, responding to change always has been difficult. collector rumsey, who recently donated more than 150,000 maps to stanford university, says maps always have had errors. >> no map is ever perfect. as you can see from some of these maps, they showed california as an island and it took a long time for that to actually get removed from the

maps-- old maps, it often took 100 years, maybe 200 years. >> reporter: google and others can react more quickly because of all the input they get. thousands of times a day, people all over the world tell google, via the internet, that roads, or signage, or stores or parks have changed, or that a their own neighborhood is poorly represented and that the company needs to update its maps. google investigates the alleged errors, and tries to correct them. the concept of having people on the ground change the map is called crowd sourcing. and it's the principle pioneered by an israeli-based mapping company called waze. that firm, with a small palo alto office, uses g.p.s. to track the location of 27 million drivers who have downloaded its app. waze depends on that crowd to update its maps, determine traffic congestion and direct

users to alternate routes. >> so while you're getting a free navigation service, you're also contributing to the community. >> reporterwazeice presidt di-ann eisnor says crowd sourcing is altering map making. >> and the crowd will not only help you get the more accurate information, because you've got millions and millions of people who care enough to make sure the world is represented and at the same time they are making sure that things are updated in a way that's unprecedented. >> reporter: she says apple didn't use crowd sourcing, a strategy many analysts say might have saved it recent embarrassment. >> the apple path was, "let's see what sources a out there alrey; let's add our own technology to bring it together, but let's not actually create our own maps. which is a fine strategy, but it means that they lose control. >> reporter: for it's part, apple has said little publicly, except of course for c.e.o. tim

cook's letter apologizing to customers for the frustrations and pledging to make maps better. apple declined our request for an interview. carolina milanesi, at gartner research, says that apple's mistakes, coming so soon after steve jobs death last year, probably won't have long term effects on the company. >> i think what you've seen in the apology was the reassurance that the core of apple, to focus on excelling in what they do, is still there. but the end game, they need to invest time and money. >> reporter: and that's just what google, apple, waze and a few other players, including nokia, tom tom and open street maps, will all be doing -all vying for a bigger niche of the exploding market for maps and advertising. >> ifill: you can watch more of spencer's interview with map collector david rumsey on our website.

>> woodruff: again, the major developments of the day: the u.s. death toll from "sandy" grew to 63, and more than six million homes and businesses remained without power across 17 states. the president said one of the biggest priorities is restoring power. he got a first-hand look at some of the storm devastation in new jersey with governor chris christie. and travel in the region began to slowly resume, with two major new york airports reopening with limited flights and some amtrak the nation's homeless may be the most overlooked group of voters. what challenges do they face on election day? kwame holman has more on that. >> holman: about half a million of the homeless in america are eligible to vote, but very few are expected to cast a ballot. see the measures one city is taking to get more of them to the polls. can a president be blamed for high gas prices? that's the question one reader posed to economics correspondent paul solman. read his reply in making sense.

and we recently repoed on human trafficking in the philippines and asked for your questions. the answers are in the rundown. finally celebrate halloween by make ago spooky political ad. you can star alongside america's latest menace, zombies. all that and more is on our website: newshour.pbs.org. gwen? >> ifill: and that's the "newshour" for tonight. on thursday, we'll look at the nation's most expensive and coetitive senate races. m gw ifill >> woodruff: and i'm judy woodruff. we'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. thank you and good night. major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: >> and by the bill and melinda gates foundation. dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy productive life.

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